Iryna Zarutska, 23, had recently arrived in the United States from Ukraine and was “seeking safety from the war and hoping for a new beginning,” according to her family. On August 22, she was looking at her phone on a light rail train in Charlotte, North Carolina, when the man sitting behind her stood up, pulled a knife out of his pocket, and stabbed her in the neck three times. “I got that white girl,” he can be heard saying over and over again. She was pronounced dead within minutes.
Video of the attack, released Friday, made it seem like a random, senseless, unexplainable tragedy. It actually was the opposite. It was completely avoidable.
The man charged with first-degree murder for the stabbing, Decarlos Brown Jr., 34, is a career criminal—a familiar term in America—with at least 14 previous arrests, including robbery and assault. When I reviewed Brown’s criminal records on a computer screen, there were more than a dozen incidents and several dozen documents to review.
Here are just a few of those details:
